Lycurgus in Leaflets and Lectures:
The Weiße Rose and Classics at Munich
University, 1941–45
NIKLAS HOLZBERG
T
he main building of the university at which I
used to teach is situated in the heart of Munich, and the square
on which it stands—Geschwister-Scholl-Platz—is named after
the two best-known members of the Weiße Rose, or “White
Rose,” a small group of men and women united in their resistance to Hitler.1 On February 18, 1943, at about 11 am,
Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans, both students at the
university, were observed by the janitor in the central hall as
they sent fluttering down from the upper floor the rest of the
leaflets they had just set out on the steps of the main staircase and on the windowsills. The man detained them and
took them to the rector, who then arranged for them to be
handed over to the Gestapo as swiftly as possible. Taken to
the Gestapo’s Munich headquarters, they underwent several
sessions of intensive questioning and—together with another
member of their group, Christoph Probst, who was arrested
on February 19—they were formally charged on February
21 with having committed “treasonable acts likely to advance the enemy cause” and with conspiring to commit
“high treason and demoralization of the troops.”2 On the
morning of the following day, the Volksgerichtshof, its presiding judge Roland Freisler having journeyed from Berlin to
Munich for the occasion, sentenced them to death. That
same afternoon at 5 pm—only four days after the first arrests—they were guillotined. Soon after this, three more people who were associated with the university and who belonged
to the inner circle of the Weiße Rose fell into the hands of
arion 23.1 spring/summer 2015
34
lycurgus in leaflets and lectures
the Nazis: the students Alexander Schmorell and Willi Graf,
and a professor of philosophy and musicology, Kurt Huber.
They had to wait considerably longer for trial and sentencing, but they too were put to death by the guillotine: Schmorell
and Huber on July 13, 1943, and Graf on October 12 of the
same year.
What had these six people done that made them in Nazi
eyes capital offenders? It was little more than the actions for
which Sophie and Hans Scholl were arrested: they had written and distributed leaflets calling for resistance to the Nazi
terror regime. Alexander Schmorell and Hans Scholl had drawn
up the first of these in the summer of 1942. Within the space
of a few weeks they had produced four leaflets—in all, the
Weiße Rose would write six such texts—and had sent a few
hundred copies of each by post to a selection of recipients, for
the most part academics. The timing could scarcely have been
worse, given the stage that the war had then reached. By the
summer of 1942, more territory than ever before was occupied by German troops, and the greater part of the Reich’s
population was more inclined to accept the Nazis than to
take a stand against them, the Endsieg still being a seemingly
real prospect. In January and February of 1943, when the
Weiße Rose circulated several thousand copies of leaflets 5
and 6 and managed, with the help of friends at other universities, to spread their ideas not just in Munich, but far afield
as well, the political situation appeared, by contrast, to be
considerably more favorable: Hitler had just been faced with
the worst defeat yet—Stalingrad. The Weiße Rose, which had
had to suspend its activities in autumn 1942 when Graf,
Schmorell, and Hans Scholl, all drafted as medical orderlies,
were sent to the Russian front for three months, now
resumed its appeals for resistance to the Nazis regime and
could point to the disastrous losses in Russia to fuel their
arguments. In the weeks before their arrest, the three young
men also found the courage to embark upon other lines of
action. On three separate nights—3rd to the 4th, 8th to the
9th, and 15th to the 16th of February—they painted slogans
Niklas Holzberg
35
such as Freiheit! [Freedom!] and Nieder mit Hitler! [Down
with Hitler!] on a number of walls in streets near the university. And on February 9, the same three, together with Kurt
Huber, talked to Falk Harnack, the brother of Arvid
Harnack, an imprisoned Communist, arranging a meeting
between members of the Weiße Rose and some people with
connections to the military resistance group centered around
Beck and Stauffenberg. It was planned for February 25 in
Berlin, but obviously never took place.
Distributing a relatively small number of leaflets, slogans on
walls, an attempt to get in touch with the “big” resistance
names—this may all sound fairly harmless compared to the
activities of these latter with their bomb attacks and carefully
orchestrated plans to overthrow Hitler. However, the contents
of the leaflets3 betrayed the readiness of the Weiße Rose to
move against the Nazis with more than the pen. Moreover, the
specific criticism of the regime that was voiced by this group
had never before in wartime Germany been articulated in such
public, accessible form. The leaflets talked, for example,
openly and in detail about Nazi atrocities; there the annihilation of the Jews is named as “the most appalling crime against
the dignity of man, a crime to which nothing similar in the
entire history of the human race can be likened.”4 The Weiße
Rose called for passive resistance and sabotage in all sectors of
public life. The powers that eventually would defeat Hitler are
requested in the leaflets not only to impose severe punishment
on all Nazis, including all the system’s “little villains,”5 but
also to found a democratic German state within a new
Europe. Two things were calculated to lend the message being
put across in these texts particular weight: on the one hand
their extremely aggressive language and style, which lashed
out against the regime with biblical wrath and apocalyptic
metaphors, on the other the employment of classical texts on
ideal political and social systems. The Weiße Rose writers
especially liked to cite ancient philosophy and the classics of
German literature that drew on such older writings: Aristotle’s
Politics, Cicero’s De legibus—salus publica suprema lex [the
36
lycurgus in leaflets and lectures
welfare of the state is the chief law] is the motto heading the
third leaflet—St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei [The City of
God], Goethe’s short dramatic piece The Awakening of
Epimenides, and Schiller’s essay The Legislation of Solon and
Lycurgus. In leaflet 1, quotations outweigh the text actually
written by the Weiße Rose authors, and the influence of such
works is also reflected at times in the phrasing of the first and
of the following three leaflets: some sentences there match
Ciceronian periods in their length.
Needless to say, only a relatively small section of the
German population, i.e., the educated middle classes, could
properly and completely understand what these leaflets—
especially the first four—were trying to say. And how did the
academics and other educated addressees react within their
own four walls when confronted with the texts? We know
next to nothing about this, except that some of the recipients
deemed it necessary for whatever reason to deliver their
copies to the authorities: the Gestapo knew about the leaflets
right from the start and was keen to find the “perpetrators.”
The official and semi-official stance taken by the University
of Munich and the closely affiliated Technical University are,
on the other hand, well documented. The university not only
made no effort at all to protect or defend its members, but
actually publicly dissociated itself from them by debarring the
imprisoned students forthwith from all further studies anywhere in Germany, and Kurt Huber was formally stripped of
his Ph.D. title. On February 22, 1943, the Nazi-appointed
student leaders organized and held a “demonstration of loyalty”6 that same evening in the university’s auditorium maximum—just after the Scholls and Probst had been murdered.
The intention was to make it clear for all to see that the members of the Weiße Rose had been “typical loners” and that
their “criminal actions” should not give rise to sweeping generalizations that vilify all students.7 The auditorium was
packed, and those present sat in silence as the local student
leader, the Gaustudentenführer, ranted about the—now
dead—“ignominious and base gang.”8 An eyewitness reported
Niklas Holzberg
37
that “hundreds of students cheered and stamped their feet in
applause for the denouncer and university janitor, and he
took this standing and with his arm outstretched,”9 that is,
with a Nazi salute. Parallel to this, Munich’s Technical
University was holding its own demonstration, to which students had been summoned by their leader with, for example,
the following words: “On Thursday morning traitors scattered an outrageous pamphlet over the central hall of the university. In it, its perpetrators befoul most basely the Führer
and the people in the very hour of our national sacrifice at
Stalingrad . . . We are demonstrating in full view of the public our contempt for these creatures . . . Long live the Führer,
long live Greater Germany.”10
It can be no surprise that Munich University reacted to the
Weiße Rose activities and the execution of six of its members
with such marked declarations of allegiance to the Nazi
regime. This was a university that had been quicker to embrace
brown-shirted ideology than any other similar academic institution in the country, and more eager to put it into practice.11
Six years before Hitler even came to power, for example, the
first chair of Rassenhygiene [Racial Hygiene] was created
here—in 1927—and in 1933 the Department of Indian Studies
(Indologie) was renamed Abteilung für arische Kultur- und
Sprachwissenschaft [Department of Aryan Culture and
Language]. Walter Wüst, a friend of Himmler’s, was professor
there from 1932 onwards12 and it was he—in his capacity as
university rector—who handed Sophie and Hans Scholl over to
the Gestapo after they had been apprehended by the janitor;
photographs of Wüst often show him wearing the uniform of
an SS Oberführer. As for the Munich students, it seems certain
that the vast majority of them were happy to go on accepting
Nazi politics and ideology even far into the war years. In the
winter of 1942/43, however, as it became known that the
German advance was being stopped on all fronts and that everincreasing losses were being incurred, the general mood among
students appears to have shifted.13 One indication of the
changed mood is an occurrence that is documented for
38
lycurgus in leaflets and lectures
January 13, 1943, a good month before the Scholls were
arrested. In his speech marking the 470th anniversary of the
university’s founding, the Gauleiter Paul Giesler suggested to
the women students in his audience that, instead of wasting
their time at the university, they should be “presenting the
Führer with babies”; his adjutants would visit the less attractive girls, who could thus, he promised, be assured of a “pleasurable experience.”14 Many of the women present tried to
leave the auditorium at this point, but they were prevented
from doing so and then arrested, whereupon there was a terrific outcry on the part of the male students. They managed to
free the women, although this involved putting up a fight
against riot police. Everything would seem to suggest that
Sophie and Hans Scholl interpreted the tumult as an endorsement of their own resistance struggle and that this is the reason why they so patently threw caution to the wind on the
morning of February 18: not only did they choose to deliver
the leaflets themselves in broad daylight, but, having actually
set out most of them as planned, they even came back one
more time to fling the rest down from the upper floor.
If there really were other people in the university apart
from the Weiße Rose group who, by early 1943, also felt less
inclined to go with the Nazi flow, then the question that
especially interests me as a Latinist and Hellenist is whether
there were any classicists among them. After all, something
must surely have stirred in professors and students of Latin
and Greek when they saw the many quotations from ancient
political theories. How did people who would often use or
hear a name like that of the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus in
classes react when they found it in a text calling on them to
resist Nazi terror? Given their specialist knowledge of
ancient political writing, could they not be expected to have
been disposed to agree with the authors of the leaflets and
their anti-Nazi argumentation? Again, nothing has documented for us the direct reader responses among the educated classes. It so happens, however, that we do know a little about the Munich Department of Classics and its mem-
Niklas Holzberg
39
bers during the time in which the Weiße Rose was active and
six of its members subsequently murdered and so we can at
least conjecture as to their way of thinking. The source of
this knowledge is a handwritten Chronik which records
events that took place in the life of the department, as it
were, and which in fact covers almost solely the years that
interest us.15 It opens with the account of a departmental
excursion on July 3–4, 1941, and ends with one entry noting
that the American troops had closed in on and then finally
entered Munich on April 30, 1945; another describes the
loss of about half of the departmental library’s books, these
having previously been sent in boxes to a castle in northern
Bavaria for safety, only to be destroyed there “in the course
of military action”16 on April 4, 1945. The chronicle is written in calligraphic script with India ink and is illustrated with
numerous photographs. Various entries bear the signature of
Franz Dirlmeier—at that time he was professor of Greek,
head of the department, and dean of the Philosophical
Faculty17—and we may assume that he did compose or at
least authorize the texts.
As one would expect, the Chronik offers no details of the
classical authors and works read in lectures and seminars—
these would have been listed in the Vorlesungsverzeichnis, a
sort of official university calendar and program—and says
nothing at all about the various classes. It concentrates solely
on the menschliche side of daily departmental life. We are
told about the gathering to celebrate one professor’s 60th
birthday, about the demise of two other professors and the
staff changes that resulted from one of these deaths. We also
find detailed accounts of excursions organized by the department and brief reports about any social gatherings arranged
for the students and the staff. On the pages covering the
years 1941–1943, the war is only mentioned twice, and then
only briefly: on August 1, 1941, one of the professors is
drafted into the army; on January 7, 1943, he is able to take
up his teaching duties again. The general impression one has
after reading the chronicle is, therefore, that life in the depart-
40
lycurgus in leaflets and lectures
ment in those days was not all that different from life there
now. The trips undertaken to visit the remains of Roman civilization in Southern Germany and Austria—between 1941
and 1943 there were six such excursions, most of them lasting several days—were astonishingly similar to the expeditions and outings organized today, and the same is true of the
“official” Christmas parties. The black-and-white photographs show us the same clusters of smiley, animated academics in rather silly “off-duty” attire, and they capture the
same impromptu antics of the odd high-spirited participant
as our color pictures do today. After April 24, 1944, the day
on which an air raid apparently scored the first direct hit on
the university, the entries then often mention such bombings
and the restrictions they imposed on day-to-day teaching.
But this altered situation is accepted without complaint—
that is the picture painted by the Chronik anyway—and people still go to classes, party whenever it is party-time (except
that the 1944 Christmas gathering planned for December 17
had to be re-scheduled for February 25 1945, because of an
air raid and then postponed once more until March 8, as the
RAF was busy pounding Munich again); on June 16–17,
1944, four weeks before a large portion of the main university building was destroyed by demolition bombs and incendiaries, they even organized one more excursion.
The entry for the second day of this trip—and indeed all the
other texts of this nature in the Chronik—could have been
written in the year 2015. The group had spent the night in a
place by a lake and June 17, 1944, was now described as follows: “Early morning dip for the ‘die-hards.’ After breakfast
a walk to the Oster lakes that had to be cut short because of
the pouring rain. At the beach: rafting and swimming. Lunch
and—with the rain still bucketing down outside—coffee
gemütlich, then troop to the railway station. Journey
home.”18 It will probably not immediately occur to anyone
reading these lines that, two weeks prior to this rafting jaunt,
the “die-hards” would have heard about another watery
expedition: the Allied landings in Normandy. Are we to take
Niklas Holzberg
41
it from the untroubled air which characterizes this account
that the students of those years lived their lives in the same
way as today’s students do, i.e., that they had no quarrel with
the government that made, for example, such excursions possible for them? Are we to assume that they were accordingly
horrified when the news came, barely five weeks after their
outing to the lake, that Graf Stauffenberg had tried to blast
their head of state to hell? Should we suppose, then, that the
students also looked upon the activities of the Weiße Rose as
criminal? A lot of the evidence seems to suggest this.
However, we should remember that it is clearly the official
voice of the department that is speaking to us through this
chronicle, and that this voice is coming from the mouth of the
departmental head who, as we shall see below, was very
probably a follower of Hitler. The voice of the student body,
by contrast, is not actually to be heard here. But there is one
entry in the Chronik which at least tells us how this voice did
once articulate itself in a way that perhaps betrays something
of the speaker’s, that is, of the students’ thoughts on Nazi
Germany. The entry in question records a recitation by students of Greek texts. It took place at a departmental gathering on December 16, 1943—the annual Christmas party,
then—and the Chronik notes: “Greek choruses, framed by
Handel sonatas [ . . . ] Men’s chorus: Sophocles, Oedipus
Tyrannus 151–89; maidens’ chorus: Aeschylus, Septem contra Thebas [Seven Against Thebes], 720–91; men’s chorus:
Sophocles, Antigone 332–75. Afterwards convivial gettogether and oral presentation of jolly poems about shared
experiences out and about and during the term’s work.”19 By
their recitations ye shall know them? Is that right? I consider
it at least possible that the nature of the Greek texts rendered
do permit some speculation as to the mood among those who
recited them back in 1943.
So, what is the nature of the three choral odes? One of
them is taken from Antigone, and this heroine is a figure
with whom Sophie Scholl has often been compared in more
recent times. Two examples: first, Greta Weil, a Jewish holo-
42
lycurgus in leaflets and lectures
caust survivor who, in 1980, published a novel entitled
Meine Schwester Antigone [My Sister Antigone] and was
awarded the Geschwister-Scholl-Prize in 1988, said in an
acceptance speech given in Munich that November: “Sophie
Scholl, she was the one, the one who said ‘no,’ the Antigone
of our time . . . how much poorer would our world be without Antigone, without Sophie”;20 second, Sibyl Oldfield’s
book Women Against the Iron Fist (Oxford 1989) includes a
chapter entitled “Germany’s Antigone: Sophie Scholl.”
Certainly, it is in my view highly unlikely that those Munich
Classics’ students of 1943 recited a choral ode from
Sophocles’s tragedy about this very heroine because they
wanted their presentation understood as an implicit reference to a fellow student who had been murdered in February
of that year. Even just the fact that they recited texts from
other dramas besides this one would seem to prove such a
notion wrong. The selection of choral odes was probably
simply guided by the wish to illustrate three poetic reflections on the tragic history of the Labdacid dynasty: the first
chorus utters a prayer to the gods in plague-beleaguered
adversity, the second besings the curse of sin that has hung
over three successive generations, and the third gives a reaction to the news that Polynices has been buried although that
had been forbidden. However, all three contain passages that
are striking when we consider the context in which they were
now recited: the war year 1943. In the ode from Oedipus,
for example, the chorus begs Ares, the god of war, to turn his
back on the fatherland. The maidens’ chorus in Seven
Against Thebes talks of past sins and fears that “the city will
perish with the kings” (vv. 764–65). And the choral ode from
Antigone opens with the famous words: “There are many
monstrous powerful things, but nothing so monstrous powerful as man” (vv. 331–32). Even if the focus there is not
only on the monstrous side of human behavior, but also on
man’s powerful capacities, the exhortation at the end of this
ode—that divine laws be upheld—is a warning for those
who are indeed monstrous.
Niklas Holzberg
43
May we assume, then, that these texts were picked for
recitation that Christmas because they could indirectly convey the students’ distress at all the suffering and injustice the
Nazis had caused by 1943? My guess is yes. The people
organizing this recitation could have chosen from a number
of Greek and Latin texts which do more than just wish that
a given war were over, predicting instead victory over the
enemy and expecting of the respective “kings” that they will
save the “city” from destruction. Such choices would have
fired hopes for Hitler’s Endsieg, while the pessimism that
pervades the choral odes sung on December 16, 1943, could
only achieve the very opposite. Let us suppose that the
recitation with its pessimistic content was indeed intended as
a veiled expression of the organizers’ own despair. We now
have to ask: who did the “organizing”? Did the initiative
come solely from students, just as today’s undergraduates
take such matters into their own hands? If so, then they
would have been the ones who picked the texts. Or was it the
department’s professors? The question can scarcely be
answered now, but it does raise another one: is it at all conceivable that the professors—if they did choose the choral
odes themselves—would have wanted the audience to discern a connection between the mythical Theban state and
their very own real one? The answer: we cannot say for sure
that it is entirely impossible, but, given what we know about
these men and their dealings with the Nazis, it is more than
unlikely. The three professors who held chairs at the Munich
Department of Classics between 1941 and 1945—Franz
Dirlmeier, whom I mentioned above, Rudolf Till, and
Richard Harder—actually enjoyed, to put it cautiously, a
very good relationship with the Nazi party. This is most simply demonstrated by the fact that the end of the war saw
them immediately relieved of their duties by the American
military authorities so that they could be denazified.
Let us look at the most important of the relevant facts we
have on the three “ordinary” professors. In Franz Dirlmeier’s
case we need note no more than that he studied together with
44
lycurgus in leaflets and lectures
the later university rector and SS member Walter Wüst, who
persuaded his friend to join the party and become a member
of Heinrich Himmler’s SS research and teaching circle Das
Ahnenerbe [Ancestral Heritage] as group leader in the Lehrund Forschungsstätte für Klassische Altertumswissenschaft
[Teaching and Research Centre for Classics]; and that he was
chosen to succeed Rudolf Pfeiffer as Professor of Greek in
1937—not because Pfeiffer was retiring, but because the
renowned scholar was married to a Jew and therefore forced
to leave his post;21 Pfeiffer emigrated to England, settled in
Oxford and soon became one of the leading Greek scholars
there. Rudolf Till, an SS-Untersturmführer and one of
Dirlmeier’s fellow Ahnenerbe members, was given the chair
of Latin in Munich at the tender age of 26.22 In his book of
codicological studies on Tacitus’s Agricola and Germania,
published in 1943, he thanks Himmler, who had used his
clout to help secure Till’s appointment, “for his all-important
inspiration and continuous ever-encouraging support.”23
Richard Harder, who joined the SA [Sturm-Abteilung; Nazi
militia] in 1933, was appointed professor of Classics at
Munich University in 1940 and, in addition to this post, took
over the external post of director of the Institut für indogermanische Geistesgeschichte [Institute for the History of IndoGermanic Culture]; this was set up at the suggestion of Alfred
Rosenberg, chief ideologist of the Nazis, as a sort of Munich
chapter of the Hohe Schule der Partei, a Nazi university
planned for the victorious post-war era.24 Not only
Rosenberg, but also the Gestapo placed their full trust in
Harder. Shortly before the Scholls were arrested, he was
asked by the secret police to analyze for them the Weiße Rose
leaflets 5 and 6. In Harder’s professional opinion both texts
were “of an extremely high standard,” and he noted in his
report: “The author’s German style is excellent, of a kind
which only someone who has long been conversant with
German literature can write: probably a humanities scholar
or a theologian then. [. . .] (The author) shows himself to be
. . . a gifted intellectual aiming his propaganda at academic
Niklas Holzberg
45
circles, particularly the student body.” Although the products
of his thought “do not sound like those of an embittered
loner and therefore a specific clique is probably behind them,
they are not, however, the outpourings of a group actively
involved in power-politics: their language is too abstract for
that; it will not (and cannot) find any echo among the wider
circles of soldiers and workers.”25 Ten out of ten, Herr
Professor. But, in spite of their “high standard,” the leaflets
remain for Harder “shoddy pieces,”26 and he must also have
known that the word “intellectual” was to the Nazis—and
especially to the Gestapo—like a red rag to a bull.
I would like to turn the tables at this point and analyze a text
written by one of the three professors in the Classics
Department and preserved for us in the Chronik. The piece in
question represents an obituary for a colleague and is signed by
Franz Dirlmeier. The heading is “Professor Maurenbrecher,”
the text reads: “Dr. Berthold Maurenbrecher was born on
August 15, 1868, in Dorpat, took up a post as assistant at the
University Library in Leipzig in 1891, as Privatdozent at the
University of Halle in 1894, was granted the title Professor in
1909, and became a non-regular professor extra-ordinary at
Munich University in 1915. In the closing years of the Great
War he began holding lectures and freshman classes on Latin
language and literature. He continued to do so until 1933. As
a social democrat he was then removed from his teaching post,
and in the winter semester of 1937/38 also from the official
university calendar. He was, until shortly before his death, a
frequent visitor to the reading room of the University Library.
He died on December 2, 1943, in Schongau. At his cremation
in Munich on December 9, 1943, Geheimrat [Privy
Councillor] Rehm represented the University in official garb.
[Signed] Munich, December 10, 1943. F. Dirlmeier.”27 What
immediately strikes one here is the style: this is the diction of
official memoranda. It records the death of a scholar, and yet
not one word is said about the man’s achievements in his chosen academic field or as a teacher. By comparison, the obituary
found in the Chronik a few pages before this one is well-nigh
46
lycurgus in leaflets and lectures
an encomium: Professor Walter Otto had died on November 1,
1941, and he, we are told, had “guided generations of young
undergraduates towards an uncompromising love of truth,”
had “made a lasting name for himself with his great undertaking of the ‘Handbuch für Altertumswissenschaft,’ and had, “as
a fervent patriot,” done much for the international reputation
of German scholarship; his death would therefore be acknowledged as a “painful sacrifice.”28 So, there are obituaries and
obituaries. And yet Maurenbrecher too was, as we shall see
presently, internationally known in the field of Classics; indeed
he still is today.
It is quite plain to see that the language Dirlmeier uses to
talk about Maurenbrecher corresponds to the style a Gestapo
officer might have used for his files. This applies in particular
to the sentence: “As a social democrat he was then removed
from his teaching post, and in the winter semester of 1937/38
also from the official university calendar.” The image is typical of Naziism and its misanthropic ideology, which decreed
that anyone who did not fit into the system had to be
“removed,” meaning eradicated like a cancerous growth.
And what more than anything else evokes here for us the language of the Nazis is the matter-of-fact way in which a biographical detail that should be anything but matter-of-fact is
recorded: a scholar is not allowed to go on teaching and
crossed off the register of university members on account of
his political persuasions. From this particular sentence, which
records glaring injustice with not a word of comment, it is
not much of a step to the words used by the public prosecutor at Munich’s District Court I to report to Berlin the
beheading of Willi Graf, one of the Weiße Rose members:
“The execution proceedings lasted, as timed from leaving the
cell, 1 minute and 11 seconds, as timed from the transfer to
the executioner until the fall of the blade, 11 seconds.”29
The cold, emotionless manner in which the Nazi murderers kept records of their crimes for the files is, as has long
been perceived, to a considerable extent the result of the
sense of order inherent in “the German character” and espe-
Niklas Holzberg
47
cially of a particular national readiness to submit to authority. German Beamte, or public servants, must—and this is
still expected of them today—do their duty and carry out the
instructions issued by their superiors. The hierarchy within
the public service is accepted as a given entity, and this
applies equally within German universities, where professors
are state employees in a system similar to that of government
officials, policemen, and bailiffs. For Dirlmeier, then, one
important detail he had to mention in the obituary was that
Maurenbrecher was a nichtplanmäßiger außerordentlicher
Professor, i.e., not a “regular professor-in-ordinary.” As
such, the departed colleague had stood lower down on the
system’s ladder than the author of his obituary, who was an
ordentlicher Professor with a chair. Maurenbrecher may
have been a prominent scholar: his magnum opus, the edition of fragments from Sallust’s Historiae, was first published in 1891, was reprinted in 1967, and is still today, even
with the publication of Patrick McGushin’s volumes between
1992 and 1994, which only offer a translation of the fragments, an indispensable standard text known all over the
Latin-studying world.30 But Dirlmeier did not feel obliged to
mention this achievement. After all, that was in a sense
Maurenbrecher’s private concern: within the professorial
staff of Munich’s Department of Classics his position as
scholar and teacher was so very “non-regular” and “extraordinary” that he had to give his lectures on Saturdays. Only
his “elementary Latin” language classes, which were open to
students from all faculties and which earned this poorly paid
man a little extra money, were granted a slot during the
week, that is, alongside the classes taught by the “regular
professor-in-ordinary.”31
The hierarchical categories in which Dirlmeier thought
also explain the positioning of the obituary for
Maurenbrecher within the Chronik. The death notice honoring Walter Otto stands out clearly from the surrounding
texts: it takes up the greater part of one recto leaf, and the
preceding verso is blank, with just a photograph of the late
48
lycurgus in leaflets and lectures
Otto in the center. The obituary for Berthold Maurenbrecher,
by contrast, is quasi-inserted between accounts of staff and
student leisure activities: dated December 10, 1943, it follows an entry—on the same leaf—about a departmental outing on December 5 to see a performance of Sophocles’s Ajax,
and after it comes, again on the same leaf, the above-mentioned Christmas gathering of December 16. Finally, one
more feature of the obituary implicitly makes it quite clear
that, even in death, Maurenbrecher was still classed by the
public service system as nichtplanmäßig. I mean the last sentence. We are told there that the university was represented
at Maurenbrecher’s cremation by Professor Albert Rehm,
and Rehm’s presence could be regarded as “in accordance
with rank”: his status was “merely” that of a professor-inordinary emeritus. There was another reason too for Rehm’s
suitability in this matter: like Maurenbrecher, the former
occupant of the chair of Greek was no Nazi. Two years later,
with the war over, Rehm was to be appointed rector of the
university by the American military government, the previous incumbent and SS officer Wüst having been relieved of
his post. However, Rehm did not last long there. Rumor has
it that he became involved in an argument with the occupying forces and had to take his leave after he had remarked,
“I hardly need Americans to tell me what a university is.”32
But that’s another story.
notes
1. Since this paper is specifically concerned with life in the Munich
Department of Classics between 1941 and 1945, only the bare outlines of the
Weiße Rose story can be offered here. For these I have drawn on Harald
Steffahn, Die Weiße Rose. Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. 2nd
ed. Rowohlts Monographien 498 (Reinbek bei Hamburg 1993) and Michael
C. Schneider and Winfried Süß, Keine Volksgenossen: Studentischer
Widerstand der Weißen Rose. The White Rose, George Low, tr. (Munich
1993) whose work presents all the relevant information in an admirably concise form. English-speaking readers will find the following useful: James
Donohoe, Hitler’s Conservative Opponents in Bavaria 1930–1945 (Leiden
Niklas Holzberg
49
1961); Inge Scholl, The White Rose: Munich 1942–1943 (Middletown,
Conn. 1983); Toby Axelrod, Hans and Sophie Scholl: German Resisters of
the White Rose (New York 2001); Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn,
Sophie Scholl and The White Rose, first published as Shattering the German
Night (Boston and Toronto 1986), with an expanded, updated edition
(London 2006); and Frank McDonough, Sophie Scholl: The Real Story of
the Woman Who Defied Hitler (Stroud, Gloucestershire 2009).
2. Steffahn (note 1), 115: “wegen landesverräterischer Feindbegünstigung, Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat, Wehrkraftzersetzung.”
3. Reprinted in Steffahn (note 1), 131–44; see also http://weisse-rose-stiftung.de/fkt_standard.php?aktion=cs&ma=cs&c_id=mamura&topic=033&
mod=2&page=1&lang=de. English translation of the leaflets in
http://dieweisserose.weebly.com/the-leaflets.html.
4. Steffahn (note 1), 134–35: “das fürchterlichste Verbrechen an der
Würde des Menschen, ein Verbrechen, dem sich kein ähnliches in der ganzen Menschheitsgeschichte an die Seite stellen kann.”
5. Steffahn (note 1), 141: “die kleinen Schurken dieses Systems.”
6. Schneider/Süß (note 1), 38: “Treuekundgebung.”
7. Schneider/Süß (note 1), 38: “charakteristische Einzelgänger . . . verbrecherische Handlungsweise.”
8. Schneider/Süß (note 1), 38: “ehrlose und niederträchtige Gesellen.”
9. Schneider/Süß (note 1), 38: “Hunderte von Studenten johlten und
trampelten dem Denunzianten und Pedell der Universität Beifall, und dieser
nahm ihn stehend und mit ausgestrecktem Arm entgegen.”
10. Schneider/Süß (note 1), 95: “Hochverräter verstreuten am
Donnerstag Morgen im Lichthof der Universität ein schamloses Pamphlet.
Darin besudeln seine Urheber im Augenblick des nationalen Opfers in
Stalingrad Führer und Volk auf die gemeinste Art . . . Vor aller Öffentlichkeit
manifestieren wir unseren Abscheu vor diesen Kreaturen. . . . Es lebe der
Führer, es lebe Großdeutschland.”
11. Elisabeth Kraus and Hans-Michael Körner, Die Universität München
im dritten Reich (Munich 2006).
12. On Wüst, see Volker Losemann, Nationalsozialismus und Antike:
Studien zur Entwicklung des Faches Alte Geschichte 1933–1945.
Historische Perspektiven 7 (Hamburg 1977), 118ff.; 232 A. 8; 243ff.
13. Schneider/Süß (note 1), 15.
14. Steffahn (note 1), 100; Schneider/Süß (note 1), 31–32: “dem Führer
ein Kind schenken . . . ein erfreuliches Erlebnis.”
15. Chronik des Seminars für klassische Philologie. Universität München
1941. Manuscript, 118 unnumbered leaves, 77 black-and-white photographs (of which 4 are picture postcards), 2 drawings, bound, 33.5 x 26 cm
(=13.2 x 10.2 inches); in the collection of the library of the Department of
Classics, University of Munich. Only 17 leaves contain writing, and clearly
by two different hands. The first one (to fol. 14v, line 30) can be identified
by the note on fol. 1v: “Entwurf und Ausführung [Drafted and completed
50
lycurgus in leaflets and lectures
by]: Gabriele Winklmaier” (G. W.).
16. fol. 17v: “im Zuge von Kampfhandlungen.”
17. See below, note 21.
18. fol. 15v: “Morgenbad der ‘Unentwegten.’ Nach dem Frühstück
Spaziergang zu den Osterseen, der aber wegen strömendem Regen vorzeitig
abgebrochen werden mußte. Am Strand: Floßfahrt und Bad. Mittagessen
und—während es draußen immer weiter schüttete—, gemütlicher Kaffee,
dann Marsch zur Bahn. Heimfahrt.”
19. fol. 14v: “Griechische Chöre, umrahmt von Händelsonaten [. . .].
Männerchor: Sophokles, König Ödipus V. 151–89; Mädchenchor:
Aischylos, Sieben gegen Theben V 720–91; Männerchor: Sophokles,
Antigone V 332–75. Anschließend geselliges Beisammensein und Vortrag
heiterer Gedichte über gemeinsames Erleben auf Fahrt und bei der
Semesterarbeit.”
20. Ute Schmidt-Berger, “Die deutsche Antigone: Sophie Scholl.” Mit
einem Geleitwort von Inge Aichinger-Scholl, Der Altsprachliche Unterricht
36.2 (1994), 80–94: “Sophie Scholl, das war sie, die Neinsagerin, die
Antigone unserer Tage . . . wieviel ärmer wäre unsere Welt ohne Antigone,
ohne Sophie” (85).
21. See Losemann (note 12), 71–73 (on a letter of Dirlmeiers to Alfred
Rosenberg on antiquity and national socialism); 120–23; 135–36 (see esp.
n. 17 on p. 233); and Jula Kerschensteiner, “Die Chronik des Seminars für
Klassische Philologie der Universität München in den Kriegsjahren
1941–1945,” in Werner Suerbaum, ed., Festgabe für Ernst Vogt zu seinem
60. Geburtstag am 6. November 1990 = Eikasmos. Quaderni Bolognesi di
Filologia Classica 4 (Bologna 1993), 71–74.
22. See Losemann (note 12), 120–23, 136, 232–34; and Kerschensteiner
(note 21).
23. Handschriftliche Untersuchungen zu Tacitus Agricola und Germania
(mit einer Photokopie des Codex Aesinas). Deutsches Ahnenerbe 1 (Berlin
1943), xi: “für die entscheidende Anregung und immer wieder erneute,
durchgreifende Unterstützung.” The book itself reflects none of the ideology Himmler expected to find superimposed on classics; its place in international Tacitus studies remains uncontested today.
24. See Losemann (note 12), 140–73, 241–56; Kerschensteiner (note 21).
25. Schneider/Süß (note 1), 33–34: “außergewöhnlich hohes Niveau” [ . . . ]
“Der Verfasser schreibt einen hervorragen-den deutschen Stil, wie ihn nur
ein Mensch schreiben kann, der in längerem Umgang mit deutscher
Literatur steht, also vermutlich entweder ein Geisteswissenschaftler, oder ein
Theologe. [. . .] (Er) stellt sich . . . als ein begabter Intellektueller dar, der
seine Propaganda auf akademische Kreise, insbesondere die Studentenschaft
abstellt.” Wenn seine geistigen Erzeugnisse “nicht den Ton eines verbitterten Einsamen haben, hinter ihnen also wohl eine gewisse Clique steht, so
sind sie doch nicht der Ausfluß einer machtpolitisch aktiven Gruppe: dazu
ist ihre Sprache zu abstrakt; sie will (und kann) in breiteren Kreisen der
Niklas Holzberg
51
Soldaten oder Arbeiter keinen Widerhall finden.”
26. Schneider/Süß (note 1), 33: “Machwerke.”
27. fol. 14v: “Dr. Berthold Maurenbrecher wurde am 15. 8. 1868 in
Dorpat geboren, 1891 wurde er Assistent an der Universitäts-Bibliothek
Leipzig, 1894 Privatdozent an der Universität Halle, 1909 erhielt er den
Professortitel, 1915 wurde er nichtplanmäßiger ao. Professor in München.
In den letzten Jahren des Weltkrieges begann er Vorlesungen aus dem Gebiet
der lateinischen Philologie und Elementarkurse abzuhalten. So wirkte er bis
1933. Dann wurde er als Sozialdemokrat aus dem Lehramt und vom
Wintersemester 1937/38 ab auch aus dem Vorlesungsverzeichnis entfernt.
Er hat bis kurz vor seinem Tode häufig den Arbeitssaal der UniversitätsBibliothek besucht. Am 2. 12. 1943 ist er in Schongau gestorben. Bei der
Einäscherung am 9. 12. 1943 in München hat Geheimrat Rehm im Talar die
Universität vertreten. München, 10. Dezember 1943 [gezeichnet] F.
Dirlmeier.”
28. fol. 7r: “Generationen von jungen Studenten zu kompromißloser
Wahrheitsliebe geführt . . . sich einen dauernden Namen gemacht durch das
große Unternehmen des ‘Handbuchs für Altertumswissenschaft’. . . als
glühender Patriot [sehr viel] für die Weltgeltung der deutschen Wissenschaft
geleistet . . . [sein Tod] als schmerzliches Opfer [zu] empfinden.”
29. Steffahn (note 1), 125: “Der Hinrichtungsvorgang dauerte vom
Verlassen der Zelle an gerechnet 1 Minute 11 Sekunden, von der Übergabe
an den Scharfrichter bis zum Fall des Beiles 11 Sekunden.”
30. B. Maurenbrecher (ed.), C. Sallusti Crispi Historiarum Reliquiae
(Leipzig 1891; reprt. Stuttgart 1967); P. McGushin: Sallust: The Histories.
Translated with Introduction and Commentary. 2 vols. (Oxford 1992 and
1994).
31. Raimund Pfister, “Bertold Maurenbrecher (1868–1943),” in
Suerbaum (note 21), 263–68; 264.
32. Franz Brunhölzl, “Theodor Hopfner (1886–1945), Viktor Stegemann
(1902–1948), Albert Rehm (1871–1949),” in Suerbaum (note 21), 203–16;
213.